Important Collectors’ Wristwatches, P...

Geneva, Hotel Du Rhone, Apr 02, 2006

LOT 393

?Vice and Virtue? Miroir, London (Spiegel, Friedberg). Made circa 1740. Extremely fine and rare, large, repoussé silver, four-train coach watch with hour and quarter striking and repeating, date and alarm.

CHF 45,000 - 55,000

108 30,000 - 35,000

Sold: CHF 54,280

C. Two-body, very finely pierced, chased and engraved with scrollwork and rocailles, bezel decorated to match, the back with a scene representing the temptations of vice over virtue, strike/silent lever in the dial plate, pendant with loose barrel and ring. D. Silver champlevé with radial Roman numerals, outer arcaded minute track and Arabic five minute numerals, date aperture above 12, inner alarm disc with Arabic numerals and half and quarter hour markers. Blued steel pierced hands. M. 83 mm., gilt, full-plate, rectangular pillars with applied silver foliate frets, fusee with chain, foliate engraved spring barrels for the striking, repeating and alarm trains, polished steel hammers, verge escapement, three-arm brass balance, blued steel flat balance-spring, very finely pierced, chased and engraved backplate furniture, polished steel endplate, calibrated silver regulator disc with radial Roman numerals. Movement signed. Diam. 116 mm.


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Grading System
Grade:
Case: 3

Good
Movement: 3*

Good

Overhaul recommended, at buyer's expense
Dial: 3-01

Good

HANDS Original

Notes

This watch, an extremely fine example of its type, shows many of the characteristics of those watches made in Friedberg for other makers across Europe. Friedberg watchmakers specialized in the production of repeating and striking watches. From the beginning of the 18th century, they were making watches and coach watches with quarter, half quarter and even minute repeating mechanisms and selling them all over Europe. The cases, often of very high quality, were produced in Augsburg and the movements were made in the style of the country for which they were destined. Some of them were signed by their makers, some bear signatures of eminent French and English makers (perhaps at their request, when they were retailing them), still others bear the signature of their makers, written backwards, together with the names of cities in which they were intended to be sold. Until the recent discovery of a large quantity of ebauches, blancs and completed movements which had never been cased, and their study by serious specialists such as Sebastian Whitestone, these watches were wrongly attributed to unrecorded makers from different European countries. For an article on German watches by Christian Pfeiffer Belli, see the Vox, Spring 2006, p. 14.